How Scott Patterson Keeps Up With the Fast-talking Gilmore Girls

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Our long national withdrawal from rapid-fire Lorelai-Rory Gilmore Girls banter may be over, but when the series revival hits Netflix this Thanksgiving, none of that fast-talking will be coming from Luke. But speaking slowly on the show takes a lot of effort says Scott Patterson, whom Vulture caught up with recently at Entertainment Weekly’s pre-Emmys party in West Hollywood

“The acting challenge is to not get caught up in their rhythm,” Patterson said, “yet not deter from the pace of the scene. That was the tricky part.”

Gilmore Girls was infamous for its fast takes and lengthy scripts. Amy Sherman-Palladino once told the The Wall Street Journal she wrote more than twice as fast as on a normal teleplay — “20 to 25 seconds a page of dialogue” versus the standard minute per page. How did Patterson work around the fast-talking Gilmores? “I’d do it by picking up my cues and — you know, I had to be smoother,” he says, “because they had this much dialogue [motions a big chunk with his hands], and then I would have that much dialogue [motions a small chunk]. It’s just the rat-a-tat-tat, no gaps, no pausing, no nothing. They end a sentence here, and you start talking there before they end it.”

Patterson didn’t go into detail on how his character has evolved, but he did note that that the upcoming revival won’t necessarily give us any finality: “You could interpret it any way you wanted.”